Some movies are bad, and that's not good. But some movies are so bad, so amateurish, so bizarrely unappealing in every single respect that you're left in awe that the filmmakers even knew which end of the camera to point at their actors. The Haunting of Molly Hartley is that kind of film, a movie made by people so devoid of common sense that you're amazed they understand written speech and know how to use simple tools. There is no purpose to it: Is it Christian propaganda? Is it supposed to scare the audience? Is it supposed to entertain any living creature? It fails on all counts, and so the only purpose I could find for it was that it was a movie setting out to hit every single motion picture cliche -- all of them -- as hard as possible.
Opening with two teenaged lovers being killed eleven years ago, the movie kicks things off by jamming in four "Jumping Cats" in just the first ten minutes. A Jumping Cat is that unfortunate moment in a horror movie when the music builds, the tension mounts, and something leaps at the actress... and it's only the cat. Phew. In the opening scene of Molly Hartley we get the wind (Cat 1) birds thrown at the actress (Cat 2), a boyfriend saying boo (Cat 3) and a masked stranger in the background who turns out to be her dad (Cat 4). Four cats! Cut to the present day, and young singer Haley Bennett, playing the titular Molly Hartley, shows up for the first day at her private school. Her dad is worried about her; there's something mysterious in her past and she skips her appointment with the school counselor. The most popular boy at school (Chace Crawford of Gossip Girl) likes her, but his mean girlfriend warns Molly to stay away.
Molly has many dreams where someone is about to kill her, and she suffers from headaches and nosebleeds, which results in a tumor being pulled from her nose. She also spends time crying on the bathroom floor, and attends a party where she gets in a catfight with Crawford's girlfriend, and bonds with the school's resident goth as well as a young student who loves Jesus invites her to the Christian Community Center, which looks about as appealing as the local methadone clinic. Molly runs away from the party, wanders the streets, collapses, and then we're treated to a shocking switcheroo for an ending where everything we assumed we knew is wrong.
If this makes it sound like there is no story that's because there isn't. The regular sign posts of plot, action and character are completely absent, and so the movie seems to exist in some kind of timeless limbo where the only sign that your suffering is over is when the credits roll. Every line of dialogue is a cliche, as is every character and even every camera set-up, and there are more Jumping Cats in this movie than a Purina Cat Chow commercial on a trampoline. But by the end, The Haunting of Molly Hartley has taken on a life of its own. I'm not sure if it's the attempted murder by full-immersion baptism, the long, lingering, gag-inducing close-ups of nasal surgery, the crack-brained lines ("Yes! I want salvation!" Molly screams at one point) or the endless scenes of people walking down the street like something from an Ed Wood movie, but this limp remake of To the Devil a Daughter does take on a psychotronic form of quasi-half-life by the end. And while a half-life is better than no life at all, it's still not enough life to make anyone want to see this movie.
Grady Hendrix is one of the founders and programmers of the New York Asian Film Festival. He writes about Asian film for Variety at Kaiju Shakedown and should have found something better to do with his life by now.
